Topics

Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

Articles

Methods are our best tool to get great software. But today they put us in method prisons with method wars, reliance on gurus and swings from method to method. How foolish is this? It needs to be stopped.
The new Essence standard efficiently stops that path. And, teams get better methods, selected from a practice library and support in their daily work. Executives get forever learning org’s.

There are dozens of Agile methods nowadays and more and more often we hear about Hybrid Agile, but what does that actually mean? This article provides a view on why it is important to have clarity around the term Hybrid Agile and what it has to mean to make sense. It provides guidance on circumstances when you could use the different kinds of methods.

At Agile Testing Days 2015, Eddy Bruin and Ray Oei explained how to satisfy the needs of stakeholders who ask for test cases, test plans, and other comprehensive test artifacts without writing large test plans. An interview about test plans in agile, how to make stakeholders aware that they can influence quality, and which agile practices they recommend for testing.

Boyan Mihaylov covers his experience when working with both traditional waterfall software architectures and agile ones. He depicts the similarities and differences between these with a focus on three areas: the specifics of the software architect role, the timespan of the software architecture, and the output of the software architecture.

Water-Scrum-fall is usually described as an hybrid agile way of working. According to Andy Hiles water-Scrum-fall is a gated and phased delivery approach for software where Scrum is used as the main development management method. It can be used as a stepping stone to agility, to become a living breathing agile organisation.

Historical data is a key resource for judging the effectiveness of software process improvement methods and also for calibrating software estimation accuracy. In this article, Capers Jones compares Agile and Scrum with a sample of contemporary software development methods using several standard metrics.

The Defense Industry is often viewed as a very “non-Agile” culture. Teams, organized along strict hierarchical boundaries, seldom collaborate freely and are forced to communicate through the handoff of contract-specified artifacts. In this article, Jeff Plummer shares his experience with successfully applying Agile principles and practices to his team working in the Defense Industry.

Joseph Flahiff maintains that agile values principles and practices can be integrated into in a waterfall environment to improve project predictability and ultimate success. He offers three keys that the project manager must use to successfully unlock the power of agile to improve project delivery.

How often do you hear that a company attempting to adopt agile practices fails? This article examines and explains the often overlooked organizational reasons that agile fails, why it isn’t obvious, and some potential strategies for coping with organizational impediments. The article’s target audience is managers with budgetary responsibility although technical groups might also find interest.

Jim Johnson, founder and chairman of the Standish Group, took time out from his vacation to talk with InfoQ editor Deborah Hartmann about his research, and the role of Agile in changing the IT industry. Johnson is best known for creating the CHAOS Chronicles: 12 years of independent research on project performance, including data on over 50,000 completed IT projects.